Sinclair Infiltrates Local News With Lara Trump’s RNC Playbook; The New Republic, June 17, 2024

 Ben Metzner, The New Republic; Sinclair Infiltrates Local News With Lara Trump’s RNC Playbook

"Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing media behemoth swallowing up local news stations and spitting them out as zombie GOP propaganda mills, is ramping up pro-Trump content in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Its latest plot? A coordinated effort across at least 86 local news websites to suggest that Joe Biden is mentally unfit for the presidency, based on edited footage and misinformation.

According to Judd Legum, Sinclair, which owns hundreds of television news stations around the country, has been laundering GOP talking points about Biden’s age and mental capacity into news segments of local Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates. One replica online article with the headline “Biden appears to freeze, slur words during White House Juneteenth event” shares no evidence other than a spliced-together clip of Biden watching a musical performance and another edited video of Biden giving a speech originally posted on X by Sean Hannity. The article was syndicated en masse on the same day at the same time, Legum found, suggesting that editors at the local affiliates were not given the chance to vet the segment for accuracy.

Most outrageously, the article, along with at least two others posted in June, makes the evidence-free claim that Biden may have pooped himself at a D-Day memorial event in France, based on a video of the president sitting down during the event. According to Legum, one of the article’s URLs includes the word “pooping.”

Sinclair's Propaganda Bomb Is What Media Critics Have Warned About Since Reagan; Esquire, April 2, 2018

Charles P. Pierce, Esquire; Sinclair's Propaganda Bomb Is What Media Critics Have Warned About Since Reagan

[Kip Currier: 
During my undergraduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh, I spent my junior year in Kobe, Japan, attending a Japanese university and living with a Japanese chemistry professor emeritus and his wife. Toward the end of my year there, my Japanese skills had gotten proficient enough to have some really "meaty", impactful discussions. I've never forgotten a conversation I had with my host mother, Haruko, who shared her experiences as a 20-something housewife raising her young sons in the waning days of World War II, while her husband taught at one of the Japanese Naval Colleges on the Japan Sea.

U.S. forces were poised to land in Japan and the Japanese state media were disseminating stories about all manner of alleged atrocities the media said would occur if the Americans were to step on Japanese soil. My host mother Haruko said that because the Japanese Imperial Army controlled the media, the populace, people like her, had no access to information other than what the state media put out via radio and newspapers. As an island archipelago with no land borders with other nations, this was especially true for Japan. Years later, she said she came to understand how they had been misled by the Imperial Army's disinformation and propaganda. I never forgot how important information--access to the truth--is.

Access to information--truthful, trusted, verifiable information--is the linchpin of a free and independent press, informed citizenry, and healthy, functioning, questioning democracies. James Madison's 1822 admonition about information, cited in the excerpt below, is as timely as ever.]

"Not only is this a cautionary tale about media consolidation—Sinclair is inches away from owning stations in Chicago and Los Angeles—it’s also a cautionary tale about the imbalance between labor and management in a very visible industry. When the mash-up appeared this weekend, anonymous Sinclair employees leapt to the electric Twitter machine to talk about the read-or-die pressure on the employees in the company’s local stations. And, when this happens in the context of an administration dedicated to keeping people stupid enough to believe all its lies, you have reached a critical mass driving the country inexorably toward the result of Mr. Madison’s great warning:

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.”"